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Annotated Bibliography

Chen, Frederick.  Poachers and Snobs:  Demand for Rarity and the Effects of

Anti-Poaching Policies.  Wiley Periodicals Inc.  2015.

Chen’s piece about poaching comes from a more theoretical perspective about why poaching persists to remain a problem.  He posits the idea that we can try to solve the issue of poaching by changing how people think of the rarity of certain animals and other species.  Anti-poaching policies affect the supply-side of illegal poaching gains (they try to reduce the supply of illegal animal products by making it illegal to hunt them), but these policies lose power and efficacy because of the demand side of illegal poaching—some unscrupulous people want ‘rare’ items no matter what the cost and if they have to break the law, they will do so. Chen believes that the rarity of certain items and animals drives up the demand and desire for them and therefore, we need to find ways to allay consumer desire for rare items or else the policies set up by the government will not be effective in the end. 

MacColl, Andrew and Paul Wilfred.  Local Perspectives on Factors Influencing

the Extent of Wildlife Poaching for Bushmeat in a Game Reserve, Western Tanzania. International Journal of Conservation Science.  2015. 

Maccoll and Wilfred explore why there is poaching in poorer communities for bushmeat (wild game meat) in Tanzania.  Doing an interview in 2009 from March to October with interviewees being nineteen heads-of-households from nineteen families near a reserve park, they tried to find the underlying factors of why these communities hunt for bushmeat so conservationists can better implement policies to lessen the extent of the exploitation of wildlife.  This text will hopefully illuminate the deeper intricate and economic reasons why people still poach.

MacColl, Andrew and Paul Wilfred.  The pattern of poaching signs in Ugalla

Game Reserve, western Tanzania.   African Journal of Ecology.  2014.

These two authors wrote about how signs affect the instances of poaching.  Throughout the Ugalla Game Reserve, there are various sign posts put up indicating that it is illegal to hunt or fish there.  However, MacColl and Wilfred wanted to determine whether or not these signs actually deterred poachers from hunting—instead, they found that illegal activities such as logging, fishing, or poaching were more predominant in certain areas of the reserve.  Poaching is just one symptom of the underlying economic issues that the reserve faces and to solve poaching, one must implement more patrols and alternatives to reduce exploitation of wildlife.

Jiang, Zhigang and et al.  Public attitude toward tiger farming and tiger

conservation in Beijing, China.  Animal Conservation.  2014.  

A survey was conducted in Beijing with a sample of 1,058 people; 381 of which were college students and the other 677 people were regular citizens.  The study was conducted to see the degree of knowledge people about the conservation of knowledge and their opinions about tiger farming as a viable way to stop tiger poaching.  The people conducting the study asked a series of questions where the participants would rank the statements between 1 through 7, 1 being completely disagree and 7 being completely in agreement.  Overall, many students were more environmentally aware about conservation issues and how we need to stop poaching overall. Scientists, however, posits that the main driving force behind declining wild populations of tigers was not loss of habitat or illegal poaching and harvesting as it was in the past, but now it is because of medicinal and healthcare uses, and ornamental use as form of societal status are the main impetus increasing demand of tiger parts. Until we educate more people to become more environmentally aware, they will continue to cause tiger populations to deteriorate until extinction.

Challender, Daniel W.S. and Douglas C. MacMillan.  Poaching is more than an

Enforcement Problem.  Conservation Letters.  2013.   

Regardless of many anti-poaching legislation and regulation and enforcement movements, numerous species of animals are in danger of becoming extinct.  Even though there is a now a growing movement towards preserving wildlife, there has been impetuses that continue to drive up demand for animal parts in illegal poaching and trade—large prices of animal or plant parts, poverty in certain communities, and finally large profits to be made due to bans of poaching and hunting.  The bans on exploiting wildlife unfortunately brought the unexpected consequence of increasing the monetary value and ‘rarity’ due to a decreased supply of wildlife, but it also allowed organized crime to participate in illegal poaching since they have the capability and sources to act under the radar of law enforcement.  Challender and MacMillan believe that we need to educate and encourage local communities to preserve the wild rather than consume it and that we need to find economic alternatives that would lessen illegal exploitation of wildlife through more regulated trade, farming of wildlife, and finally with more ranching while also increasing funding for wildlife conservation through methods such as taxation. 

Humphreys, Jasper and Smith, M.L.R.  The ‘rhinofication’ of South African

security.  International Affairs. 2014.

This article proposes that to have a long sustainable strategy to conserve rhinoceros, we need to not just treat the symptom of poaching (i.e. catch and punish the poachers), but that we need to convince poachers and the general population that there are viable substitutes to poaching available.  We see that in poorer, rural communities in Africa, conservation policies are inevitably linked to other social and economic reform policies.  Humphreys and Smith believe that a conservation program would need to include things like housing and social aid along with land reform to encourage more economic stability that would decrease motivations for illegal poaching, either for subsistence or for profits.  Like other authors, we can see some theories for possible solutions against poaching, but this could be a uphill battle as anti-poaching legislation is viewed by the less fortunate as another ‘war on the poor’ movement by the elites unfortunately. 

Vandegrift, Joseph.  Elephant Poaching: CITES Failure to Combat the Growth in

Chinese Demand for Ivory.  Virginia Environmental Law Journal.  2009.

CITES  or Convention on International Trade in Endangered Speciesof Wild Fauna and Flora was completely unprepared for the spike in the Chinese demand for illegal ivory products.  Due to a richer middle-class who has gained more purchasing power, they started a fervor of demand for ivory due to its historical and cultural status symbol as a sign of power of wealth.  They expected the local Chinese law enforcement agencies to enforce laws against illegal ivory trade, but they are incapable of dealing with it also due to the large increase in the demand for ivory steeped in cultural origins.  Therefore, they should ban the ivory trade completely. Just like we’ve seen in other articles though, poaching will continue to be a problem in Africa due to poverty, incentivizing poachers to kill these animals to make a large profit outweighing the consequence of the illegality of poaching.